Dream Girl Read online

  But the only thing people today want to slow down for is food. Artisanal this and artisanal that. It’s fuel. Who cares where your potato came from?

  “Gerry, the woman has fourteen followers,” Thiru said. “Ignore her for now.”

  “She’s using an image from the cover of my book as her avatar. Isn’t that an infringement of the artist’s copyright?”

  “Possibly. But attention to a troll is like, like—well, it’s what they want. They blossom, they get bigger with attention. Your account is verified. When fake Gerald Andersens sprout, we do go after them, sometimes. But usually the best course of action is to ignore. This is an unknown person pretending to be a fictional person.”

  A fictional person who has been writing me and calling me, claiming to be a real person who inspired the fictional person when no such person exists. A person who says I have an unsightly penis. It is not an unsightly penis. It is simply uncircumcised, something that would be known by almost forty women.

  Who is Gerry kidding? He knows the exact number, which is thirty-seven. He was a late bloomer, a truly late bloomer, in part because of his early marriage. He had more partners in his forties than he did in his twenties and thirties combined. But not a single woman—not a wife, not a girlfriend, not even Margot—had ever commented unfavorably on his penis, even in passing, even if it was their first of that variety. Circumcision was a false aesthetic, like fake breasts, that had somehow become the norm. He gave his parents credit for very few things, but Gerry was proud of them for resisting circumcision at a time when almost all U.S. boys went through the procedure. That said, he never doubted it was his father’s usual narcissism at work: My son has to look like me.

  Joke’s on you, Dad. While Gerry has his father’s coloring and blond hair, his father was a small, narrow-shouldered man. When things were at the very worst between him and Gerry’s mother, in the years when he refused to make child support payments, Gerald Senior had once suggested that Gerry wasn’t even his son. “How I wish that were so,” Gerry Junior said to his father, hoping they would be the last words he ever spoke to him. And they almost were.

  Done with Thiru, Gerry summons his assistant back. “How did you find this Twitter account?”

  “She tagged you.”

  “What?”

  “She used your handle in her tweet, so it was in your mentions. You don’t get tagged a lot. When you—I—post poems or the sentences from books you love, there are retweets and a lot of replies. But it’s unusual for someone to tag you in an original tweet.”

  “Did anyone notice?”

  “She received”—Victoria checks her phone—“seven likes and no replies. Whoa!”

  “What?”

  “Just like that, it’s unavailable. It disappeared while I was looking at it. I should have grabbed a screenshot.”

  She showed him the phone.

  “What do you mean? She—‘she’—is still there.”

  “The account is there, but the tweet is gone. I wonder what happened? Did your agent complain after all, do you think?”

  “No, he was adamant that we should ignore her. Victoria—is there any way we can find out who this is?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe some kind of IT person knows how to do it. But I wouldn’t worry about it. You gotta remember—you’re seeing this, but most people aren’t. And now it’s gone.”

  “But if there’s a Twitter account, that could be connected to the letter and the phone calls.”

  Victoria nods politely. Has Aileen briefed her? Does she also believe the calls are a figment of his drug-assisted imagination? It’s true, the caller ID once again showed no evidence of a call. And the next call, the one in which no one spoke, turned out to be a wrong number. He had asked Aileen to call back and the person, an elderly woman, had been quite huffy.

  Finally, finally, the day ends with no more penis drama. Gerry has begun to think of the two hours between Victoria’s departure and Aileen’s arrival as his best hours. Even when the girls (women, sorry) are quiet, he feels their presence. To be alone is at once a luxury and a poverty. He craves it, he needs it, but he cannot afford it for more than a few hours right now. Victoria still comes and goes during her shift, but she feels more present these days, hovering.

  And while Aileen appears to be avoiding him as much as possible—her work as a night nurse seems to have been chosen because it allows for quite a bit of napping time—he can feel her in the apartment, imagines he can hear her, wheezing like an old dog in her sleep.

  The days are getting slightly longer, the sun setting at about six. An orange light suffuses the apartment, the kind of sunset that tempts a writer to do his worst work. Sunsets are for painters or photographers; writers should leave them be. Elmore Leonard also told writers never to begin with the weather, yet Dream Girl begins with the weather—

  The phone.

  He lets it ring three times before he picks up.

  “Gerry? I’m so sorry.”

  “You have to stop this stupid prank—”

  “I never should have said that. About—you know. I got a little drunk last night. I miss you so.”

  “I have your number on caller ID.” He doesn’t, but it will be on the other phones; he will tell Aileen to look for it the second she arrives.

  “I can’t wait to see you, Gerry. It’s been far too long. I have such a wonderful idea. I shouldn’t say anything, but—well, I’ve figured out how you can repay me.”

  “Repay you?”

  “For my story. My lawyer said I could sue you for half of everything you’ve made since Dream Girl was published, but I don’t want to do anything that contentious. Also it sounded so tedious—forensic accounting, blah, blah, blah, and it’s really hard to separate Dream Girl from your net worth because it’s the foundation of your net worth, you know? I mean, if you’re worth ten million dollars, one could argue that I deserve five—”

  “YOU DON’T EXIST. Even if you did—”

  “Oh, I exist, Gerry. I exist. And I’ll see you very soon.” With that, she’s gone.

  When Aileen comes to work, he asks her to check the caller ID.

  “Someone did call,” she reports from the kitchen. “At six thirty-seven.”

  “Is there a name?”

  “Wipper.”

  “What?”

  “Wipper.”

  “WHAT?”

  “WIPPER.” She writes it down for him. W-Y-P-R.

  “That’s the local NPR station.”

  “Is it?”

  “Bring me the number.”

  “Would it kill you to say please?”

  She walks back to the kitchen, returns with the phone, fumbling it in her meaty hands. “I think you just have to press redial—”

  The phone rings three times and goes to voicemail. “Thank you for calling W YPR. Our offices are closed now.”

  Technically, W YPR is part of Johns Hopkins, or used to be. There was definitely some sort of affiliation. Gerry thinks of the moment that Dream Girl came to him, the young woman who—

  But he had not written about that young woman, he did not know that young woman, and he had never told the story to anyone.

  Or had he? Had he told someone and forgotten? Was tonight’s conversation even real?

  2015

  “OUR NEXT QUESTION is from Gretchen in Baltimore,” the interviewer said.

  But my Gretchen is in New York, Gerry thought, then laughed at his own solipsism. The world was full of Gretchens. And this voice—a young, lilting voice—was nothing like his second wife’s, not even when she was in her twenties.

  “I know you’ve always been obscure about the actual inspiration for Dream Girl—” the caller began.

  “Not obscure,” Gerry said. “I just don’t think it’s important. The book was a feat of imagination. The book and the character. The story. I made it all up. That’s what novelists do and I felt that concept had become lost in a world where people spoke of ‘creative nonfiction.’ I had no pat
ience with these reported stories, all these writers bragging about their copious research. Per Eudora Welty, I wanted to show that a quiet life can be a daring life—”

  “Yes, yes, because all serious daring starts from within.” There was a familiarity in the way the woman finished his sentence, a good-natured impatience, as if she were a former student. Or a former wife. “The thing is, the Aubrey sections, when we see her view of things—they are outstandingly nuanced. In your other novels, you’ve never managed to write a female character as credibly as you did with Aubrey.”

  “I have to take exception to that.” He tried to say this with good humor and thought he pulled it off.

  “Of course you do.” The caller laughed. It was a warm laugh, seemingly without malice. “But I have to ask—did you actually have a collaborator on the novel? Did a woman write or extensively revise the Aubrey sections?”

  This was a new one. “That’s a new one,” Gerry said dryly. “All these years, no one’s ever thought to question whether I had a secret collaborator.”

  “Or maybe there was something you read, a student paper, when you were teaching—”

  “Dream Girl came out in 2001. I taught at Goucher in 2012.”

  “And at Hopkins in the 1980s and 1990s, no?”

  “Believe me, I did not—” He stopped himself from saying, I did not have a student whose work was worth stealing. “I’m sorry, these are inflammatory charges.”

  He looked to the host for help, but she seemed to be enjoying the discussion. Served him right for being gracious, doing this nonsyndicated radio show because it was easy to stop in Baltimore after last night’s event for PEN America down in DC.

  “But even you would have to concede that Aubrey is an outlier in your work? You had never before written a female character as complex as she is, nor did you do it again. Although you did kill her. Even Aubrey had to die. It’s reminiscent of the Mary Gordon essay, ‘Good Boys and Dead Girls’ in which she posits—”

  “I am familiar with the essay, which applies that critique to Faulkner, Dreiser, and Updike,” he said. “I understand your point. But just because you say something doesn’t make it true.”

  “Which part isn’t true? The part about Aubrey being your best female character or my speculation about how that came to be?”

  “I reject your thesis, which means that your speculation is specious to me.”

  The host interrupted. “I’m afraid we’re out of time. Our guest today was Gerry Andersen, a prizewinning novelist and a Baltimore native. His latest novel, Isolation, is now out in paperback.”

  Gerry left the radio station. It was less than ten blocks to the train station and he decided to walk, despite the typical April weather—blustery, cutting back and forth between clouds and brilliant blue skies, a very Jekyll-and-Hyde day. He could not quiet his thoughts. The woman knew him, he was sure of it, but it was not Gretchen, not his Gretchen, with whom he had not spoken for years. She had sounded so pleasant, yet the conversation had felt aggressively nasty. It was true, when Dream Girl was published, there had been a lot of praise lavished on Gerry for his depiction of Aubrey, for giving a voice and an inner life to what the novel’s main character, Daniel, saw merely as an object of his desire. Daniel’s inability to see Aubrey as a person was the tragedy of the novel. Somewhere, in the notebook he had kept while working on Dream Girl, Gerry had jotted in the margin: “The Sterile Cuckoo, but good.”

  As he walked to the train station, he thought about his youthful discovery of John Nichols, a writer he now disdained. Thesis and antithesis, leading to synthesis. Was that not the path of a creative life? Embrace, reject, combine the two, move on. Was that not the path of his life? He was fifty-seven years old, thrice married, thrice divorced. But—but!—he was admired, an acknowledged leader in his field, and quite wealthy to boot. And the work (his true drug, his true obsession) was getting better, despite what anyone thought.

  Baltimore’s Penn Station seemed absurdly small to him now, but pretty in a way that New York ’s Penn Station could never be. He sat on one of the wooden benches that lined the high-ceilinged space, waiting for his train to be called. He was rising to his feet to go down to the track when his phone rang. A Baltimore area code. Had he left something at the radio station?

  “I hope I didn’t upset you,” said a woman’s voice. It was the woman from the radio show. “I really am sincerely curious about how you created Aubrey.”

  “Do I know you? Who are you?”

  She laughed. It wasn’t a cruel laugh, but it wasn’t friendly, either.

  “Do you know anyone, Gerry? Even yourself?”

  The woman hung up. He called back, but no one answered, even as the phone rang and rang, never going to voicemail.

  February 26

  AS A TEENAGER, Gerry had read Chandler, Hammett, John D. MacDonald, although his favorite was Ross Macdonald. By college he was mildly embarrassed by his affection for the private detective genre, and he no longer reads it, although he recognizes there are a few outstanding practitioners working within crime fiction, albeit almost accidentally. Still, the affection remains.

  So when he decides to hire a private detective to investigate the Case of the Vanishing Tweet, among other things, he is vaguely disappointed that his condition will not allow him to visit some seedy little office with a frosted pane, the agency’s name stenciled in chipping black paint. A silly fantasy, and even if such detectives existed, why would he want one? He wants someone honest and reputable, up to date, but it’s hard to find online reviews for private detectives. He can ask Victoria, of course—it’s her job. He Googles, but the information that comes back is daunting in its volume.

  He takes it as a nudge from fate when he picks up a Baltimore magazine from the pile by his bed—it has come to this, Gerry has read all his New Yorkers, cover to cover—and sees a feature on the back page, Five Questions With. The subject in January was Tess Monaghan, private detective.

  She is a handsome woman. Not his type, but broad-shouldered and capable looking. Somewhere in her thirties, with a sardonic way of speaking, at least on the page. She has a partner, male, but he is not pictured. Is it silly to call a PI because she happened to be on the back page of a magazine? Well, so be it. He calls and is happily surprised to hear a human voice, more surprised still to realize it is the woman herself.

  “I’d prefer to meet face-to-face,” she says when he starts to explain why he is calling. “You won’t be billed for it. Even if I end up taking the job, the first consultation is complimentary.”

  Even if—funny, it had not occurred to him that she could turn him down.

  “That can be arranged,” he says. “Although—I’m confined to bed, for now, as I’ve had a bad injury. Can you get to Locust Point?”

  “Sure. Last I heard, they weren’t checking passports to get onto the peninsula.”

  “Can you come between five and seven? Those are the only hours I am alone, and I want this to be confidential.” He isn’t sure why he feels that way. He just knows that he could not bear to have Victoria or Aileen nearby, eavesdropping, rolling her eyes when he describes the letter that can’t be found, the calls that leave no trace.

  “Tonight?”

  “If possible.”

  “I’ll have to work out child care.”

  “Oh, you have a child?” That didn’t fit with his image of a PI at all.

  “Allegedly, although she’s more like a cranky divorcée in the body of a fourth grader. If this is urgent—”

  “I think it is.”

  “Then I’ll be there.”

  She is, at five thirty sharp. She is even taller than he had imagined, her reddish-brown hair tousled by the February wind, which has been howling formidably again, but maybe it sounds worse on the twenty-fifth floor. She is of a type he knows well from growing up in North Baltimore—a female jock, possibly lacrosse, attractive despite her disdain for makeup and clothes.

  She is remarkably free of judgment, even k
ind, when he begins to describe what has been happening to him. She listens intently, interrupting only to clarify facts.

  “So first there was a letter? With a return address that matched the address you gave—a made-up address—to a fictional character? Only the letter disappeared?”

  “Yes. Things were hectic after I fell. I assume it was thrown away by accident.”

  “Then a couple of calls and this one tweet? Alleging, um, intimate knowledge of your anatomy.”

  “Yes.”

  “But the tweet disappeared within twenty-four hours, followed quickly by the account itself.”

  “Yes, but my assistant saw it, she can vouch for its existence.”

  “The calls—the first two weren’t on the call log at all and the third time the listed number took you to the main switchboard at WYPR?”

  “Yes.”

  She nods and smiles, still without judgment. “What do you think is going on, Mr. Andersen?”

  He couldn’t feel more ridiculous.

  “Someone’s trying to—I don’t want to say gaslight, that word is everywhere now, no one even remembers what it means.”

  “It’s from the film, of course. The husband manipulates the lights.”

  Oh, he likes her. “Yes. The things this person is saying, they’re just not true. I made the character up. People want to think it’s a true story—people always want to think there’s a true story—and I made it a policy not to be drawn into that conversation about my work and my silence has become a void that people fill with their own crackpot ideas. But now I’m beginning to think—well, what if she says she expects money from me, to be repaid? What if this is leading to some kind of attempted extortion? Even a frivolous claim could burn up quite a bit of money. And time.”

  Not that time is a precious commodity for him now, stuck in bed, not writing.